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When a programme is over-running and over-spending, the situation can be heavily compounded by the organisational reaction. It’s a bit like being in an escape room where you have been conditioned to believe that there are only three levers marked cost, time and outcome.

How do you persuade your team-mates not to touch those levers, and what other levers might be in the room?

The answer is of course yes, but is it also sapping the organisation’s attention, energy and intellect at the expense of other more important things such as strategy, customer focus and genuine evolution of the business’s operating model? Profits aside, what are the wider impact of defective change? What is the trajectory of defective change, and most importantly, what’s the solution?

There’s a scene I’ve watched play out umpteen times over the past three decades. The setting is the boardroom, and the starring role is played by a question that I’ve seen posed by some of the most astute non-execs I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. Usually it is directed to the member of the c-suite who is designated as the executive sponsor of the current over-running, over-spending, slippage-laden transformation programme.

There’s an old adage that programme slippage is a bit like carbon monoxide poisoning: It’s cumulative, often invisible and there are few warning signs prior to the unconscious drift into the fatal moment. In a programme, the analogy is all of those instances where the small deadlines were missed; a week here, a couple of days there.